[.mac]

Hello,

my Omniweb sometimes takes 100% CPU time without any reason. I have to quit OW then and restart my work, cause OW is unusable in this state. I cant see any reasons, why OW runs wild, i just do some surfin´.
The Installation of OW is about 3 months old, the last month this issue appeared. I think there were no bigger upgrades or something that could have caused this (i think 10.4.9 ist compatible with OW?).
OW also quits itself very often, mainly while using imageshack.us

Can you help me about this? Can i help with posting logs or something?

[JKT]

There is a known issue with JS and garbage collection in the current version of WebKit that OmniWeb is based upon. This could be the same issue you are experiencing, but to make sure, perform a sample for the OmniGroup. Use Activity Monitor to do this - select the OmniWeb process when it is hogging the CPU, and either click the Sample toolbar button (if you have added it by customising the toolbar) or select View>Sample Process from the menu bar:



After about 10 seconds a report will be generated that you should save and send to OmniGroup using the Send Feedback option from the OmniWeb help menu. Describe what you were doing at the time you took the sample (e.g. how long you had been using OmniWeb, what site or sites you noticed the problem in, etc.).

Note, if it is the same bug, quitting and relaunching OmniWeb will (temporarily) solve the problem - it will probably take a while to quit though.

[JKT]

Another thing to try is clearing your history as a corrupted history log can also cause OmniWeb to max the CPU.

[Forrest]

Boy, it'd be nice if we could get some things like this added to the FAQ.

[.mac]

Thanks guys, but unfortunately it has not solved the issue. I think its getting worse and worse instead. I have to quit and restart OW about 5 times a day...
The coders should think about releasing a fix for that. OW is a paid item, not a free product like Camino or Firefox.

[JKT]

Fwiw, as the issue is to do with JS (assuming that this is the same problem you are suffering from - do perform a sample and send it to OmniGroup to be sure), it is much more likely to be triggered if you are frequently visiting JS heavy websites. For example, I can guarantee I am going to experience this bug whenever I open a particular Workspace of mine, so I avoid doing so until I know I'm going to quit OmniWeb afterwards.

Unfortunately, the issue isn't in OmniWeb per se, it is in WebKit. OmniGroup have been in the process of upgrading to a newer version of WebKit that doesn't have this problem, but it is taking much, much longer than any of us end users have liked. As far as I am aware, the problem for OmniGroup was that WebKit underwent a significant overhaul not long after the version upon which 5.5.x is based and this effectively meant that they had to start from scratch again to modify it to include all the OmniWeb additions. Personally, I also suspect that they have been concentrating developers on their more profitable software such as OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner and now (probably) OmniFocus.

[Forrest]

FWIW, I've also noticed this issue in Firefox.

[Jerseycoa]

Originally Posted by Forrest

FWIW, I've also noticed this issue in Firefox.

I have all of them, I think, and they are all affected. One will work for a time, but eventually it will happen. So I no longer see it as an OW issue, but I am still hoping browser developers can get to the bottom of it.

I have never seen this on a PC, just my iMac.

[.mac]

I can not recognize that. I switched back to Safari (2.0.4) for a few days now an i never was plagued with this issue. I think this is an OmniWeb issue.

[Forrest]

Safari doesn't support all of the JS features OW does. The specific issue with OW is due to using WebKit, which Safari is based off of. Safari uses an older version. It's been fixed in the newer versions of WebKit, but that introduces other issues as well.

Also, I tend to keep way more tabs and windows open in OW than in Safari just because OW organizes them better. That, compounded with Workspaces (which Safari doesn't have) increases the chance of CPU cycles getting sucked up.

The third problem is that everyone and their mom thinks they can write JavaScript. They can't, so there's a lot of poorly written sites out there causing problems.

OW 5.6 does a better job of recognizing when the problem occurs and then cleans it up without forcing the user to restart the browser.